Via the wonderful San Francisco-based culture blog of Scott Beale, Laughing Squid, comes this incredible hand-animated series of graffiti animations: MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.   blublu.org Prediction: we’ll see lots more innovation in future mixing code-based, digital artwork and physical media. And since that’ll take some time, and we, […]

Background: Many laptop-based Mac OS X users are experiencing significant audio issues on Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard. On Tiger, the culprit appears to be the AirPort Extreme Update 2008-001 released earlier this spring. One workaround on Tiger is to simply turn off AirPort. On Leopard, the problem appears to be slightly more complex, […]

While we’re having a weekend of Live tutorials, here’s another one for you, this time using your iPhone / iPod touch. Now, I’m not sure I’d want to do a whole set like this, necessarily — but here’s a thought: you could use this to do some sound checks out in the house instead of […]

Our friend Gustavo Bravetti is back with more Ableton Live tutorials. Looks like good fodder for working on some music making this weekend — especially if you’re not familiar with some of these techniques. First up: cascading follow actions can break up endless looping repetition by triggering complex patterns. Gustavo throws in some "dummy clips" […]

As more readers send in reports, the picture looks something like this: both Mac OS X 10.5.2 and an AirPort update for Tiger are suspect in problems causing audio dropouts and other issues on some (not all) recently-updated Macs. Serato is joining Native Instruments in saying 10.5.2 is "officially unsupported." At the same time, a […]

Mac users can get passionate about running the latest and greatest. But it’s worth tempering that enthusiasm, as on any OS, with some healthy caution about your critical machines. Photo by Mark Pang. (Beautiful office, mate!) Apple’s "point" releases — those seemingly-harmless updates you get automatically in Software Update — do sometimes break stuff. I […]

Brad Sucks, the (despite the name) well-loved Internet musician, has been blogging and releasing tools he’s building to make his online music life better. This one is especially nice: it’s a simple, open source script that connects mailing list sign-ups to Google Maps. Armed with this information, it’s easier to see where your fans are. […]

Slicing, remixing, looping, "live performance-oriented features" … this is Digidesign we’re talking about, right? Digi’s Advanced Instrument Research (A.I.R.) unit, the fruits of the acquisition of Wizoo, may have a pretentious name, but they’ve been doing some pretty great work on new instruments. The new project, Transfuser, will have to enter some crowded waters. Loop […]

A spherical view of the Baltimore Symphony, by Zach Stern. Ableton announced that they’d be doing an orchestral sample library — called, logically enough, the Orchestral Instrument Collection — way back when Live Suite came out last year. But Orchestral Instruments actually didn’t ship then. As of this week, it is shipping. You can buy […]

Native Instruments is releasing some cheaper ways of getting at their software guitar modeler, Guitar Rig, in the form of a cheaper software version and a hardware bundle: Guitar Rig 3 XE is a "lite" version of Guitar Rig, focused on the basics — 5 guitar/bass amps, 12 cabinets, and 21 effects. It also some […]